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Actor Richard Dreyfuss, who most recently played Ponzi schemer Bernie Madoff, is a proud supporter of civics education in schools through the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative. So it’s no wonder that Dreyfuss showed up at a Ted Cruz rally this month to hear what the Republican presidential candidate had to say. Practice what you preach.

Hollywood actors, however, usually pay a price for curiosity about Republicans, such as the conservative Texas senator. Dreyfuss, who most folks assumed was a run-of-the-mill liberal, shocked many on the left when he said he wanted to hear Cruz’s message. “It's the politics of my country,” Dreyfuss explained back in Iowa, “so I'm interested."

Cue the firestorm.

His son Harry hit back. “It is not shocking that people mistake curiosity with support, but it is pathetic and it is tragic,” he wrote on the website Medium. “Exalt curiosity. Exalt the ability to hold someone else's belief in your mind for a moment.”

Certainly no one would call Richard Dreyfuss a raging Republican. While promoting the Madoff television movie on Good Morning America, he was asked what it was like playing “arguably the most despicable man in modern history.” He responded: “Actually, he’s the second most despicable man because I’ve already played Dick Cheney” (the Republican vice president under George W. Bush).

After the backlash against his attendance at the Cruz rally, Dreyfuss and son went on Fox (the horror!) to explain the uproar to Megyn Kelly. It was an opportunity to plug the Dreyfuss Civics Initiative (thedreyfussinitiative.org). In a video on the website, Dreyfuss calls the U.S. constitution “nothing short of a political miracle.” He argues that by cutting back on civics education, “kids don’t understand the uniqueness” of our system. And without understanding the system, they won’t safeguard it by participating in it.

“There can be no greater mandate in education than enabling and guiding our children to act as responsible citizens engaged in their community their nation and the world around them that is our promise to our future,” he says in the video. “That is our oath.”

In the civics exam on the 2014 National Assessment of Education Progress (NAEP), in which a representative sample of just over 9,000 8th graders was tested, the majority couldn’t answer this basic question:

Which of the following is a belief shared by most people of the United States:

The country should have a single political party.

The country should have an official religion.

The government should be a democracy.

The government should guarantee everybody a job.

Only 32% picked the correct answer (C), while 51% picked D, which may explain Bernie Sanders’ support. It’s not surprising that the average score for the NAEP civics test was 154, which is three points better than the results of the 2010 test but still well below the 178 score that is the cut-off to be considered proficient. Overall, 23% of test takers were proficient or above.

Dreyfuss isn’t alone in pushing for school districts to go back to the days when every high school student was expected to have gone through a class tagged as “civics.” The Leonore Annenberg Institute for Civics offers links to about 50 sites that promote understanding of the function of government.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor is behind a website called iCivics.org, which uses computer games to simulate various hallmarks of the American system, such as the jury trial and running for office. iCivics says it has registered more than 70,000 teachers nationwide.

Retired Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court Sandra Day O' Conner in 2012 (Photo by Jemal Countess/Getty Images)

“We don’t learn civics and how to be involved as a citizen genetically; We have to learn it every generation,”says O’Connor, the first woman to sit on the Supreme Court, in a video promoting the site. “We need to teach young people that they’re going to grow up and be in charge.”